A few sites had a chance to check out a non-playable demo of Batman: Arkham City on Thursday in San Francisco and have written up some of the cool things they saw. Here’s a bit from GamePro:

The demo portion covered a part of the game we’ve heard a lot about: Catwoman’s "execution" at the hands of Two-Face. The developer walked us through her rescue, which involved a lot of beat-downs and brawling plus some of the cheesiest dialogue we’ve ever heard from a video game (let alone a Batman comic book). The rescue sequence concluded with Joker taking a potshot at Catwoman with a sniper rifle from somewhere else in the massive city of Arkham. The developer used Batman’s Detective Mode to trace the bullet trajectory and then he went to investigate Joker’s whereabouts. To avoid spoilers, I’ll just say a church tower blew up and Batman can now bust through windows in truly epic getaway fashion.

Hit the link above for more of their preview. IGN has also posted a preview and here’s an excerpt with much more at the link:

This is the Dark Knight as I imagined him. As a big Batman fan (I own around 200 Batman graphic novels — yes, nerd) I have a pretty critical eye to all things involving the Dark Knight. 2009’s Arkham Asylum was a good start, but this Batman seems more like the one I knew and loved for years in the comics. And this is his Gotham, on the verge of collapse but someone remaining solvent seemingly by the force of Batman’s willpower.

Rocksteady Studio’s and Microsoft offered our first gameplay glimpse of Batman: Arkham City in San Francisco today, a 20 minute demo that took Batman from rooftops to city streets, from courthouse to church, seamlessly and (almost) flawlessly. Rocksteady said Arkham City is “not a sandbox game, but not a linear game,” but somewhere in the middle.

Again, you’ll find more of their preview at the link above. And the guys at GameSpot had this to say:

Needless to say, the short demo was impressive and it seems like Rocksteady has really tried to focus its efforts on not only bringing Arkham City to life, but doing it in a way that makes sense within the Batman universe. Still, we’re interested to see just how far off the beaten path Batman can go, and what benefits there are to doing that as opposed to just trying to focus on the main part of the game.